Miss Fellows was inclined to fear that I had really endangered my life by this ghostly rendezvous.  I can testify, however, that it was by no means “death to me,” nor did I experience any ill effects from the event.

My friend, the clergyman, made me the desired visit in January.  For a week after his arrival, as if my tormentors were bent on convincing my almost only friend that I was a fool or a juggler, we had no disturbance at all beyond the ordinary rappings.  These, the reverend gentleman confessed were of a singular nature, but expressed a polite desire to see some of the extraordinary manifestations of which I had written him.

But one day he had risen with some formality to usher a formal caller to the-door, when, to his slight amazement and my secret delight, his chair—­an easy-chair of good proportions—­deliberately jumped up and hopped after him across the room.  From this period the mystery “manifested” itself to his heart’s content.  Not only did the rocking-chairs, and the cane-seat chairs, and the round-backed chairs, and Tip’s little chairs, and the affghans chase him about, and the heavy tete-a-tete in the corner evince symptoms of agitation at his approach, but the piano trundled a solemn minuet at him; the heavy walnut centre-table rose half-way to the ceiling under his eyes; the marble-topped stand, on which he sat to keep it still, lifted itself and him a foot from the ground; his coffee-cup spilled over when he tried to drink, shaken by an unseen elbow; his dressing-cases disappeared from his bureau and hid themselves, none knew how or when, in his closets and under his bed; mysterious uncanny figures, dressed in his best clothes and stuffed with straw, stood in his room when he came to it at night; his candlesticks walked, untouched by hands, from the mantel into space; keys and chains fell from the air at his feet; and raw turnips dropped from the solid ceiling into his soup-plate.

“Well, Garth,” said I one day, confidentially, “how are things?  Begin to have a ‘realizing sense’ of it, eh?”

“Let me think awhile,” he answered.

I left him to his reflections, and devoted my attention for a day or two to Gertrude Fellows.  She seemed to have been of late receiving less ridiculous, less indefinite, and more important messages from her spiritual acquaintances.  The burden of them was directed at me.  They were sometimes confused, but never contradictory, and the sum of them, as I cast it up, was this:—­

A former occupant of the house, one Mr. Timothy Jabbers, had been in early life connected in the dry-goods business with my wife’s father, and had, unknown to any but himself, defrauded his partner of a considerable sum for a young swindler,—­some five hundred dollars, I think.  This fact, kept in the knowledge only of God and the guilty man, had been his agony since his death.  In the parlance of Spiritualism, he could never “purify” his soul and rise to a higher “sphere” till he had made restitution,—­though to that part of the communications I paid little attention.  This money my wife, as her father’s sole living heir, was entitled to, and this money I was desired to claim for her from Mr. Jabbers’s estate, then in the hands of some wealthy nephews.